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About six months ago a friend of mine sent me a e-mail asking me about meal planning. She was trying to get her recipes organized. She asked me what I used and also told me what she was trying. Up to that point I had been using excel to plan my meals. I would go through my cookbooks or find recipes online and using excel I would put together a two week meal plan. I was not overly happy with my system but it worked for the most part. After getting her e-mail I also started googling meal planning software and in my search I found Plan to Eat.

So what is Plan to Eat you ask? Basically its an online recipe storing/meal planning service. They offer a 30 day free trial(a year subscription is either 39 dollars a year or 4.95 a month. So I tried the 30 day trial and I have not looked back. Here is a small list of features.

1. You can import recipes from many recipe sites with a click of a button. They have a bookmark that when you find a recipe say at taste of home you click the bookmark and it instantly adds it to your recipes picture and all. All you have to do is look through to make sure it has imported everything correctly(it works amazingly well!) and click save and there it is ready for you to use. It can not do this for most blogs but they have a bulk add feature and its just about as easy and only takes a few extra minutes.

2. You then can take all these great recipes and plan your meals. You pick recipes and add them to days of the week. Once you have planned your week( or more then one week or a whole month if you want) of meals you can then get your shopping list.

3. The shopping list! O the shopping list makes the 39 dollars a year the best money I have ever spent. Basically the shopping list works like this. It adds all the ingredients you need for the recipes you have picked for that weeks meal plan and puts them into a easy shopping list. It has many options and you will spend a little time at first setting it up to your liking.

Here is a picture of my list at the end of a shopping trip. I have cut my shopping time by 25% I bet since I started using this site. The shopping list has so many options that you will just have to try it out for yourself but the one that might interest a lot of you is the ability to shop by store. So if you go to more then on store you can easily make a list for each!

The other thing I love about this site is the fact that the owner is always adding updates! Your going to get your moneys worth if you sign up. They have a great facebook page HERE. They are also passionate about cooking home cooked meals which leads me to the next exciting thing. They are doing a challenge and give away right now on their blog! Its called Cooking through Jamie’s Food Revolution. Here is how it works. Each week on Sunday night they will post a meal plan for the next week using Jamie Oliver’s cook book. They plan to cook all the recipes in the book. Each week one person who as cooked one recipe and posts about it in the comments will get a FREE year of Plan to Eat!! How cool is that? So head over and read more about it!

Tomorrow I will post the recipe I tried for this week. I hope you will join in on this challenge what a great way to try some new recipes(and buy a new fun cookbook) and maybe get a great prize. Here is a link to the cookbook on Amazon.com. Lets get cooking!